At the Bar; From the mountains to the prairie to the oceans white with foam, a law firm sells itself.

By David Margolick

Published: August 7, 1992

Imagine that Shea & Gould, the law firm representing the Mets, sponsored their broadcasts, too. Or that some televised, inside-the-Beltway brawl like the McLaughlin Group was brought to you by Covington & Burling. Or that "L.A. Law" was sponsored by a real Los Angeles law firm like O'Melveny & Myers.

It sounds far-fetched, for the fanciest corporate law firms have ceded the airwaves to their poorer cousins in the personal injury, divorce and immigration bars. Corporate types have always marketed themselves more discreetly, through country club lunches, agate type in the back of Metropolitan Opera playbills, and, increasingly, by planting self-aggrandizing articles in the press.

But a bold experiment, or at least what counts for one in the world of pin stripes and white shoes, is under way in Seattle. Forty-three times last month, in 60 seconds of saccharine broadcast during commercial breaks on the local news, "Good Morning, America" and "This Week With David Brinkley," the 110-lawyer firm of Williams, Kastner & Gibbs sang of its commitment to excellence.

On the screen were actors impersonating lawyers at work and play -- sailing, fishing, water skiing, jogging, reading to their children, all All-American towheads who look like young Al Gore 3d. Also on display were soaring images of the Pacific Northwest. Seattle may be short of prairies and fruited plains, but as the commercial made clear, it has plenty of purple mountains majesty and oceans white with foam.

One would be hard-pressed to know from all this that Williams, Kastner is actually a law firm, the seventh largest in the Northwest, let alone that it specializes in such mundane matters as insurance defense work and corporate litigation for the likes of Aetna, Johnson & Johnson and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation. In fact, one wouldn't even know the firm has a telephone or an address. But wherever Williams, Kastner is, it is clearly morning there.

Of course, communicating information is not the point of advertisements like this. Does anyone really know what Archer Daniels Midland, or other stalwarts of Sunday morning public affairs programming, actually makes? Does anyone really care? The object, instead, is to deliver an image, announce one's presence, disseminate one's name.

Whatever business it ultimately generates, the advertisement has already brought kudos to its producer, the R. W. Lynch Company of San Ramon, Calif. This week Lynch, which bills itself as the largest producer of lawyer advertising, will collect one of the first five "awards for dignity in lawyer advertising" at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, an organization that would just as soon see all such professional peddling disappear.

The Lynch Company sunk $250,000 into the production, a good part of which went, presumably, to filming on one of those rare days when Seattle is sunny and Mount Rainier can actually be seen from downtown. But in the lingo of manifest destiny, Lynch sees the corporate bar as the last frontier of lawyer advertising. Make it palatable enough, it appears to believe, and in tough times like these, even the stuffiest law firms will swallow it.

"Attorneys must find ways to differentiate themselves, one from the other," the chairman of the company, R. W. (Randy) Lynch, said in a news release. "They must achieve favorable top-of-mind awareness and recognition by existing and potential clients, many of whom perceive parity among firms -- a corporate firm is a corporate firm is a corporate firm."

As befits corporate lawyers, Williams, Kastner did not tread onto Madison Avenue lightly. How would clients react on seeing the firm tout itself on "Meet the Press?" Thus, before anyone had seen the first gauzy images of children feeding pigeons in Westlake Mall or sailing on Lake Union, the firm's managing partner, Jerry Edmonds, sent out a sincere alert to the firm's 325 top clients.

He explained to them why the firm had taken its first few baby steps into hucksterdom ("Williams, Kastner & Gibbs is not as well known as we believe it should be"), assured them that the firm had not lost its marbles (the commercials, he wrote, were priced "affordably") and hinted that lest they thumb their noses at the undertaking, they, too, stood to benefit ("The more successful we can be, the more we can develop our capabilities to serve you"). And, in case they had any reactions, he enclosed a "feedback form" and a stamped envelope.

The firm's marketing director, Susan Johnston, said few clients had replied, but those who did commented favorably. "Some people thought the approach was perhaps too sentimental, but you can't hit everyone," she said. And how had other firms reacted? "They tease and scoff and make snide remarks," she said. "but in their heart of hearts they're thinking, 'Why don't we have one of those?' "